and to try and remember that I am still in a
place of public amusement. What do I see
on the bill ? Odds frogs and capers! (as my
favourite Acres would say) here is a Frenchified
notion of attending to the comforts of
the common people! Here are stalls again,
with elbows and cushions, in the Gallery—
yes! Stalls, in the gallery of a British
Theatre! Fancy the gods, the common
people who can only pay a shilling a-piece,
sitting in their stalls! Once show the lower
orders as much attention as you show their
betters, and they will be behaving like their
betters, and there will be no hootings nor
howlings, nor stampings, nor cat-calls, and
the character of the gallery will be lost for
ever. What next, Mr. Webster—I wonder
what next?

I ask this question, but there is no need to
do so. My eyes are hardly withdrawn from
a transmogrified gallery, before they fall on
a transmogrified pit. Where are the benches,
the good old dingy greasy rows of knife-
boards? Gone— and in their places more
stalls with elbows and cushions. Any increase
in the price? Not a halfpenny. Two
shillings, in the old times, for sitting on a
pit-plank, with your neighbour's elbow in
your stomach. Two shillings, in the newtimes,
for sitting in a pit-stall, with your neighbour's
elbow where it ought to be. My clerk—my
overpaid clerk, who has only nine children
and gets a hundred and twenty pounds
a-year—can take his wife and daughters to
this anti-national theatre, without making
their backs ache: can put them in their
places without any preliminary rushing and
pushing; can seat them next to the fattest
man in England, and can make sure that they
won't be squeezed. Squeezed, did I say?
What has become of a certain time-honoured
female figure, peculiar to an English pit?
Where is our unparalleled insular female
nuisance, the fruit-woman, whom I saw the
other night, at my favourite old-fashioned
theatre, charging longitudinally through the
happy occupants of the pit-planks, using her
basket as a battering-ram, and opening her
ginger-pop over the shoulders of the public?
Gone, sir! No such person known at the
New Adelphi. No such person inquired
after, by the audience; no, not even in the
driest part of the evening. There the English
public sat, sir, in their Frenchified pit, with
their refreshment-room to go to if they
pleased, as calmly, as comfortably, and as
uncomplainingly as if they had been used to
it all their lives.

I felt my temper going. Mine is a very fair
temper under ordinary circumstances: but it
is not quite proof against the provocation
of the New Adelphi. I say, I lost
my temper, and I half rose to leave my
unendurably easy seat—when a new line in
the play-bill caught my eye. "No Second
Price!" I sat down again, incapable, even
after all that I had seen, of realising this
climax of innovation. If there is an English
institution left in this country (which I
sometimes doubt), it is, Half Price. Don't we all
know what a blessing it is for the audience
who have been fools enough to pay whole
price, to be invaded at nine o'clock by
another audience, who have been wise enough
to pay half price? Don't we all know how
it improves the closing scenes of an interesting
play, and how it encourages the actors
who happen to be on the stage at the time,
to hear the silence in the theatre suddenly
interrupted by a rushing and scraping of feet
and a rapid opening and shutting of box-
doors? No Second Price! I protest I could
not believe it—I thought it was a hoax—and
I waited, to make sure, till nine o'clock
came. Dead silence; the play and the actors
entirely uninterrupted; not a footfall in
the pit, not a bang at the box-doors. That
was quite enough for me—I felt my own
individuality slipping from under me, as
it were—and I left the theatre, on patriotic
grounds, never—no, never— to enter it
again.

You may call this prejudice, and you may
ask what it all means besides grumbling. It
means, sir, that Mr. Webster's foreign freak
is likely to alter other places of public amusement
besides his own. Before long, this
gentleman's mischievous experiment in building
will be teaching the once contented English
public to exact comfortable seats, sensible
arrangements, and architectural fitness and
beauty from managers generally, as well
as stage entertainments; and the necessary
consequence will be, the transmogrification
of most of our other theatres, as well as
of the new theatre in the Strand. We
have risen to be a great people under our
existing theatrical system; we were going on
remarkably well on our characteristic bare
benches— and, on pure conservative grounds,
I protest against Mr. Webster's conspiracy to
slip cushions under us, to support our backs, to
give room for our legs, to please our eyes, to
coddle our hardy lower orders, and to save
all our pockets. Let this rashest of existing
managers beware. He has entered on a
career of which no man can see the end. He
has spoilt the public with good accommodation
already— the next outrageous luxuries
they will learn to clamour for will be good
plays.

I remain, sir (in an epistolary sense, but
in no other), yours,

J. BULL.

P.S.— I forgot to mention, as a last instance
of the absurd manner in which the public is
petted at the New Adelphi. that the management
looks carefully after anything they
may leave behind them in their seats—
publishes a register of the articles so found, in
the play-bill—and keeps them to be applied
for at the stage-door. Here is a premium on
carelessness, and a mischievous discouragement